Africa in the Western Spaces

 Things continued to happen slowly. One of them is building community and support network, which mostly happens through private get-togethers and public festivals. Like everywhere for immigrants within the Western metropolis, there is such tradition in Madison. It’s Africa in food, music, dance and clothing. Within the community there exists, however, the jollof rice war between Nigeria and sub-Sahara of the continent, notably Ghana and Senegal. 

It was my second week. The next few days would see Africa Fest in Madison, a gathering of Africa and her friends with cultural exhibits, entertainment, dance and food.  I did not expect to see a large population of Hausa people but I hope to meet one person. I must definitely go there to meet fellow Africans, Nigerians, and particularly someone from the North.

                                                    
 

Africa is so similar that you can be forgiven for mixing one country and people with another except for the national flags at the kiosks. However, Nigerians are distinguishable by their Nigerian pidgin and accent, and their tendency for dominance. 

I saw Fulani sombrero from Gambia and Uganda and some little cultural artifacts from almost all the countries that I used to see in my grandmother’s room. What warmed my heart was the sight of a Northern Nigerian woman. From her dress I could tell she was from either Kaduna or Katsina (look closely at the background in the video). I battled the urge to walk up to her. I didn’t know how to start. An idea was cooking up in my head. I would just walk up and speak to her in Hausa to spring up a surprise on her! Being someone deeply concerned about faux pax, I gave my idea a second thought, pointed to the group of women and asked Michael about the nationality of the women. It turned out they’re from Senegal. 

L-R: Me, Tolu, Hannah, Michael, Nneoma

 

A few days later one of them named Astu hosted Senegalese dinner for the African community. Such events, like I said, are meant for veterans to welcome new comers. They’re helpful in the process of settling in new arrivals. Most of them went through similar process and wanted to pass the baton. Few people would fail to extend such gesture to someone going forward.

Discussion followed after eating as in the American culture of social event: foody first before anything else. In Nigeria, people hang around meaninglessly and pretend they don’t care. Also, in the US people are encouraged to pack away the food after events, because, as they always say, who would eat if you leave the food? Doing that in Nigeria would cause you being associated with negative social baggage. Packing away the food comes as a relief for the real and technically-made bachelors like Theophilus, because – you’re right if you’re guessing – “you don’t have to cook for some days” as he told me last night after a social event.   

I sat down with Astu and had a conversation with her. I was fascinated by the similarities between her Senegalese people and Northern Nigeria. The connection is obviously way beyond skin color. We tried to figure out. Maybe because of Islam, but more so because of Sheik Nyass, a Senegalese who is wildly popular among Nigerian Muslims. 

I told her that my friends in Nigeria travel to Senegal every year for the Sheik’s Maulud. She told me that her brother in Senegal is called Abubakar. I told her in return that my sister in Kano is her namesake. Aisha being Astu in Senegalese variety. Oh, it’s so sweet. There was a girl with Chadian descent in my neighborhood named Ashta.

I had set my mind to not to expect many Northerners here, but I was sad by not seeing anyone at the festival, which speaks about their presence not only in Madison but in most Western spaces. Many factors are at play here, including religious and cultural and something weak around good enough social hustling. But generally, people in the North majorly return home after whatever they did abroad.  

I am not overly inclined to ethnic leaning, but it will be great if I could find a family that can dress like me, cook and eat my cultural food and with whom, like everyone, I can abandon the English language and converse in my native tongue.

 

Madison, WI

 

Book review: Fatima Salihu's Sketches

With mathematical imprecision, Fatima Salihu’s debut collection of poems touches issues on death, love, nature and illogicality of life. The collection offers a middle ground of gentle read and rough ride, supple and tough, coded and open, sadness and joy. You feel powerless and helpless reading these poems very aware of the reality of the world we live in.

The first poem sets the tone. It is about lost love, violence and danger. Closely followed is a poem on sins and injustices, where, ironically, those who are to protect destroy.  The powerful rule and the downtrodden are crushed beneath the jackboots.

We struggle through life, fighting many battles, winning some and losing others. In the middle of this we pause and turn to nature for its healing power.

Poems in the collection recognize the humanity in us as being fallible and imperfect even as we are urged to not to lose sight to the next nasty experience. There is a sense of resignation as we come face to face with the reality of existence. We can never be perfect since there is no time for that in life. 

For he who still breathes, is never complete

We all wait to become perfect

When we dissolve (p.6).

Man should claim his place in the Cosmo as fluid and flexible in a positive way. You are more than just an element in the scheme of things. “You can be happy and More…” in fact, “You are happiness itself” (p.9).

Fatima’s poems are not open confessional; they are a bit coded to appear like a secret in plain view. We can only follow the sketches and piece up the dots. Even as she tries to make a cover under metaphor we can detect how the poet/persona was once duped in love. She had toiled through building a relationship only for the love to be stolen away.

I was once the chief

happy with all I built

but a lucky thief

stole the tree (p.21).

Duped II is a continuation poem that shows a grown persona who no longer acts on emotion. She seems cold and wary and learns to trust her instinct. The place that was once fertile is now barren.

Death theme has appeared several times in the collection. We are presented with the vivid picture of how the inevitable steals the attention of a mother and takes away the child. And therefore, as the poet experiences deaths, she affirms to the reader that poets also grieve in their own way:

Who say poets do not grieve

When they knit pains into words

And spread them on the sentience of vision…Without paying homage to tears (p.12)

The anguish of death comes up in Tayaza poems, tender feeling and emotions on the brink of death.

Our Devils is about duality of self, the inner struggle we experience from our different personalities and competing voices. What is more, after the grind and the hassle of day the night offers the moment needed for the interrogation of self. You take a journey into this abyss where you touch base with the real you “Until you either become dark with silence/Or silently dark” (p.49).

Salihu depicts the world inside out, where we ignore some signs and dismiss them erroneously. We have got to learn to interrogate, to ransack our inherited values and our everyday life. When it is too normal and things are not breaking, it’s not normal. “Normalcy is a travesty/in their normal sense and/in an abnormal sense.” It is not all the time that we must make sense out of things. As a mathematician Fatima discards her scientific and logical self.

A feminist, Salihu walks the world in fluidity that allows the freedom of the individual. Many think feminist ideology is in head-on collision with motherhood. This is not the case with Fatima. She shows herself, in a series of questions, asking if she could ever be a good mother that she wishes, imagining herself through childrearing of her kid from infanthood to when a boy becomes a man. At this point she expresses doubt, nay misgivings, as to whether the child can pay back.

She closes the work asserting the place of women, depicting them as, not weaklings, but nation builders which, ultimately, requires more than just a muscle. Mathematician and poet Fatima exemplifies that women are not merely reducible to the kitchen and the other room.

I have a mixed feeling for this book. I love the content but hate the design and what appears to me a shoddy editing as in page 5, 14, 19, 32, 38, 39 & 55. It oozes garish vulgarity and lacks the artistic social graces and tastes. I pray the publishers will bump up their publishing standards and eliminate avoidable errors next time.

 

Theories of her, the colors of her: a review of Mariya Sidi’s Theories of Me

A unique dilemma arises while reading a book of poems. Is poetry a work of fiction?  Should it receive the same handling and treatment as prose and drama? This dilemma hits me when I looked at the blurb of Mariya Sidi’s Theories of Me after finishing the book.  The dilemma, though, mine not as critical, is compounded by the fact that poetry is seen more as a recollection of personal experiences than as fictional creation. Why people like to look at it this way is a question that you, the reader, have to answer. 

Dr Mariya Sidi 

Because I know her, and I don’t want that knowledge to influence my reading in any way, I told my mind to never assume I know Mariya at all. To blur the line further, I read the book backward to defamiliarize and form a bulwark against any possible emergence of linear meaning.  But as poem after poem flew by, each one confirmed my hunches or washed away my doubts.

Theories of Me is a fiction work of non-fiction. With clarity and eloquence, the book came as clean and elegant as possible. This work is not a work inspired by studied reading of poems bearing thee and thou. It is pure outpouring of personal experiences. Halfway through I was grappling with what not to say not what to say.

Divided into four parts, the book contains different but related poems united at the level of texture, theme and mood. It is characterized in entirety by innocence, human isolation, emotional pain and nostalgia.

Sidi’s poems invite the reader into the journey of her growth, from the naïve idealist, trusting and credulous, to where she came full circle as a matured individual.

Theories of Me, published 2019

The first section of the collection named Loving contains poems that depict undying love that was never reciprocated. Throughout the book, there is a constant gap between the poet and her desire, each episode painfully fuelling her affection. You call it pain – and what is true love other than pain?

Trying to stop my heart

From straying to you

Is trying to stop my compass from pointing North

I’m damaging my batteries (p.3)

Lovesick and betrayed, she fawned and drooled for the love. But the object of her affection remains unruffled. She is the martyr of love who enters into martyrdom aware of her own choice; or let’s call it helplessness, because “If I never place my heart in your hands/I’ll never know what you’ll do with it”. What “he” will do with it is to test her or break her and he chose the latter.

In awe of her crush, she is unsure and uncertain. But what she fails to verbalize face-to-face to her lover she scribbles in verse for the world to see.

At this stage, Sidi is not only struggling with love but with the uncertainty of her craft. The early poems are sprinkled with occasional allusions to her doubts.  In the meantime the pain of the unrequited love fueled her creativity. After-all, every cloud has a silver lining.

It’s heartwarming that each section’s title sits well with the emotion of the content. The Crumbling stage is the stage that leads to her break and finally realization. She used to look away at the disappointments her lover caused but here she says it as it is:

I tried to be honest

You saw only tactics

I lowered my defenses,

You saw a wrong move

I was giving up

You smelled defeat (p.36)

She has already lost trust of the world and did a comeback, coming out wiser and stronger. Clarity is the arbiter of sophisticated mind. The clarity of her thoughts is just unbelievable.

In Rebirth, Mariya’s poems deal with self-worth and independence and lost memories. But the overriding theme permeating the book is human vulnerabilities and the duality of self. She is one person in private and another in public domain. She takes us into many private scenes that we never had known, though we are aware of their existence even within us. She takes us to the sanctorum of her bedtime loneliness where we meet a lady curling up into her own anguish.

Sidi’s book tugs at the delicate strings of the heart, gentle pain, uncomfortable pleasure. Pain that could not hurt. Pleasure that couldn’t console. As a bedtime music addict I suggest while reading the book you play Dafin So by Nura M Inuwa, Safe by Westlife, Fall into My Arms by Johan Gloss and Zurfin Ciki by Isa Ayagi.

Mariya comes across as calm and unassuming but who we meet in these pages is a woman of restless spirit, calm demeanor sitting atop raging battles.

She drifts through the walls and doors

Creaking no floors

Squeaking no doors

If she was any more quite

She would fade into silence

She was pain

She was loneliness (p.47)

Loneliness is what happens when the people around you fail to understand you. Sidi is probably one of those people who talk to themselves. She is a free spirit trapped in her own body and circumstances. To realize your own bondage and the attendant helplessness either troubles the mind or sets it free.  

Sidi takes to writing poems as an outlet to relieve her mind. But poetry only approximates her feelings. The anguish of unspoken pain can make you but a walking shadow. Speaking up has a magical healing power. So, you can imagine what would have happened if she did not write these poems.    

Loved/Whole section is the final stage of her self-discovery. After a long journey, she realized she didn’t have enough of herself for everyone. I tried as much as possible not to think of her but I couldn’t help asking “Oh dear Papa God what happens to Mariya” when I read “Self-Love”.

Enough strangers have

Found their way to me

I’m done with this love charity

I’m burning these petals…(p.74)

“Please don’t,” I was about to say this when I realized growth is the fork where you part way with trust and gullibility. Poems at this stage deal with bits and pieces that make up the human body complemented with neuroses that drive the motion.

Through the power of imagery and uncanny revelatory method, the poet shows her resilience and strength and owns up her flaws and vulnerabilities. We feel for her and relate with her experience. Pain is the tapestry of our existence.  But despite this pain there is lightness in Mariya’s work. You read the poems and feel refreshed and light. I tried to hate even one poem. It is heartwarming I failed. Not a single poem is punctuated. Which suggests unending possibilities… Mariya the medical doctor is different from Mariya the poet. I am pleasantly disappointed she did not allow the work to get choked off with medical jargons. Please greet her for me if you see her, shake her hand for me and buy her drink before we meet.